The Yum Yum Factor

Makes 2 loaves As I mourn the impending end of my beloved summer weather, my thoughts start to turn to homemade bread, stews and other cold weather dishes. I do love fall though so I am not quite ready for stew but I couldn't resist turning on my oven to make some soda bread. Browning the butter gives the bread a nice, nutty flavour and it really is the easiest thing to whip up. No yeast, no resting, no rising, just dense, chewy, delicious bread that is best on the day you bake it but it makes great toast for the next day or two, not that you will have anything left to test that out. Brown Butter Soda Bread 1/4 cup of unsalted butter 3 1/2 cups all purpose flour 1/2 cup old fashioned rolled oats 1 tbls sugar 1 tbls chopped fresh rosemary and more whole rosemary leaves for topping 2 tsp baking powder 1 tsp baking soda 1 tsp kosher salt 3/4 tsp freshly ground black pepper plus a few more grinds for topping *1 3/4 cup buttermilk 1 egg white, beaten with a sp...

If you live in Toronto, you have probably had shortbread from Mary Macleod's at some point. Unlike most other self named companies, there really is a Mary Macleod and she started baking her famous chocolate crunch shortbread in 1981. Even after 30 years in the business, Mary, herself, still spends time in the kitchen coming up with new treats like the Butterscotch Shortbread Crumbs I used to make the crust for this cheesecake. I was more than happy to accept a free bag of cookie crumbs to experiment with because I would happily buy them anyway. I used to live right across the street from Mary's shop on Queen St East for a few years and so I was very familiar with the product. It's not like I had ever run over there in my pjs and grabbed a few cookies to go with my morning coffee or anything.....

who wouldn't want a cookie with some Bugels on top?? One of my favourite cookies is my Compost Cookie Bar   - I used to make  Compost Cookie Bars for the kiddies  when The Kid was at his Magical Unicorn School, using fun junk like Cap'n Crunch, caramel corn, Bugels, candy canes. I was very popular at his school. I needed a dessert to serve with Chili Verde, Vegan Jackfruit Pozole and a Beet and Roasted Fennel Salad with Pepita Crema for a drop in dinner at The Depanneur . I guess I could have gone the more traditional Mexican cookie route but where's the fun in that? Green & Black had sent me a few bars of their Organic Maya Gold   to play around with and , after tasting it, I knew it would make the perfect base for Mexican Compost Cookie Bars. The 60% dark chocolate bar's flavours are taken from a traditional Mayan drink from Belize so it's full of nutmeg, cinnamon and orange - a love match with salty, porky, chicharron. Whe...

Because I love a challenge, I agreed to accept a giant vat of BioSteel Whey Protein Isolate , which is their brand name for protein powder, in order to come up with some tasty, protein rich recipes. Protein powder is not just for body builders and NHL hockey players, you know. It can be a godsend for people who need more protein and moms trying to sneak a bit into their picky kid's diet but the problem lies in the quality of the protein powders that are out there. Many other powders can contain stuff like processed soy, artificial flavours and sweeteners, fake colour and synthetic nutrients that are not all that easily absorbed by our bodies. BioSteel was developed by NHL trainer, Matt Nichol, who was sure he could do better and BioSteel was born. If it's good enough for Mats Sundin, it's good enough for me. The classic way for mere mortals to use it is to throw some into a morning smoothie but that can get boring and not everyone likes smoothies so that'...

I have participated in the Great Food Blogger Cookie Swap since it's inception so, seeing that this is the fourth annual swap, this is my fourth time baking for three fellow food bloggers. This is always a bit stressful because cooking for other people who blog about cooking is a bit of pressure. What if my cookies are terrible? What if they got lost in the mail and sit on a shelf at some post office in Kapuskasing  for a month and get all stale and hard? What if the recipient thinks they taste like dust and cobwebs, dipped in chalk?

I wanted to make a cake to raffle off at our Magical Unicorn School's halloween party and the only thing I knew that I wanted to do was use black food colouring in ganache and drip that down the sides. I found some rubber black mice and and really liked the idea of black on black. Red Velvet cake was the original plan when I came across the most delicious sounding recipe for a pumpkin spice cake and I changed my mind, which is, of course, my prerogative. I would make a Pumpkin Spice Layer Cake with Spekulas Cookie Buttercream and Spooky Ink Black Ganache.

Did you know that Kyoto is a sister city to Boston? They became sister cities back in 1959 and, in fact, their gift of the Japan House to the Boston Children's Museum is thought to be the most expensive gift ever given to an American community from a foreign sister city. The two cities collaborate on various events throughout the year and are very tight.

As we all know, we are knee deep into holiday baking season and I wanted to make all new cookies this year and I get sick of making lime meltaways and gingersnaps year after year, even if that disappoints some of my people. I had great success with   Chai Tea Cookies , Cardamom Quince Layer Cookies  and Chocolate Dipped Gingery Pecan Shortbread and wanted one last cookie to round things out. I guess it's because my kid is no longer little that I am gravitating towards more grown up flavours and away from just sweet and easy. After a wine fueled pinning frenzy, I found these cookies on Rock Recipes and couldn't get them out of my mind. The basic cookie dough looked great but I detest chocolate mint chips with a white hot passion. Actually, I only like fresh mint and have never found any sort of food item that contains any sort of mint extract that I would want to eat. I also really prefer chocolate to anything else so I used his basic cookie recipe and then changed it to s...

I have been searching for this recipe for days, knowing that I made them and that I wanted to make them again. I have not lost my mind, it just seems that this ten year old recipe was supposed to auto publish and it never did lol! So, here you are, a tasty cookie recipe from the past. Chocolate Dipped Gingery Pecan  Shortbread 1 cup flour 1/2 tsp baking powder 1/4 tsp salt 1/2 cup butter, room temp 1/3 cup sugar 1/2 cup raw pecans, coarsely chopped 1 tsp vanilla approx 100 grams dark chocolate (I used 70%) 2 tbls butter another 1/4 to 1/3 cup pecans, more finely chopped than the first 1/2 cup 2 tbls finely chopped crystallized ginger 1/2 tsp fleur de sel or some other coarse finishing salt Preheat the oven to 325F Whisk the flour, baking powder in salt together in a bowl and set aside. Cream your butter and sugar together with the paddle attachment until nice and creamy - I like to do this for a good five minutes, scraping down the sides as needed. Add the vani...

I am going to be very honest with you right now. The Great Blogger Cookie Swap was happening and the deadline for shipping was only days away. I had assumed, this whole time, that I was going to make cardamom/rosewater palmiers and had planned to make them at the very last minute to ensure their freshness upon delivery. As the time approached, I started panicking. What if they got lost in the mail? What if the Canada Post truck fell down a sink hole? What if my recipients opened their package only to find stale, horrible palmier train wreck cookies that would bring shame upon all of our houses??? Instead, I made the Cardamom Quince Layer Cookies that went out to the three bloggers who were assigned to me. These are really good but very strongly flavoured and when they are warm, out of the oven, they are incredibly cardamomish and after eating one like that, I had a mild breakdown. THEY WERE NOT GOOD ENOUGH TO SEND TO OTHER FOOD BLOGGERS FOR THE LOVE OF EVERYTHING OH HOLY NIGHT! ...

I am really pissed off at this weather. It is just barely mid September and it is freezing outside. This is Toronto. We should be having a lovely, long, hot September, not a cold, windy, overcast September and I am about to just quit. I am not sure what I am quitting exactly, but I quit. The only good thing about this stupid weather is the fact that it felt like the right time to make an apple crisp. I got all exited about doing something new, maybe adding some chunks of dark chocolate with some crunchy nuts or something and made the mistake of musing out loud so that Shack got wind of my plans. I swear to god, this guy is turning into his father over night. Suddenly, there is only ONE way to eat apple crisp, three ways to eat pasta and the only thing I am allowed to add to homemade ice cream are either raspberries or strawberries.  I said to him "you do realize that I am a food blogger, right? I won't have much to write about if I can only make apple crisp with c...

We were invited to a BBQ this weekend and I wanted to bring a dessert. There was a big bag of dark purple plums sitting on the counter that I bought on a whim even though nobody really eats much fruit around here. We certainly use fruit for ice cream making and smoothies but none of us are ever likely to go and grab an actual piece of fruit and just eat it. I am not sure what possessed me to buy them because I really only wanted to eat one plum at the time but they came in a big bag and they were the price of a couple of plums at the grocery store, so the plums came home. Anyway, because I had this big bag of plums I knew I would have to bake something with them. I floated the idea of cinnamon plum ice cream to Shack but that was promptly shot down. He likes raspberry ice cream with no add ins so that is what has been going on in this house lately. I considered a plum pie but I am kind of afraid of pastry dough to be perfectly honest. Despite the fact that I adore pie, I a...

For a few years I made artwork with glass. When The Kid was a toddler and we owned a SFX (that's special effects for you civilians) shop, I was awarded my own Harry Potter workspace in a corner, under the stairs. I had been dabbling in stained glass before that and this enabled me to finally work in a bigger format, all on my own.

When Dorset Cereals offered to send out a box of samples to 15 members of the Food Bloggers of Canada I was all over that like a plump pug on poutine. It was an easy choice because I already know that I really like Dorset granola and, to be honest, I don't really want to be taking free stuff from companies that I don't already like because I hate having to say bad stuff about people's products. It's so much easier to just accept things that I like because I prefer to keep things positive as much as I can. Also, I am afraid that if I diss somebody's Cheesits they are going to send their Cheesit hit men out in the night to whack me. Easier to just accept good stuff and keep it real, right?

I have been staring at a container of ricotta in my fridge for weeks now. We bought it for Shack's lasagna but then he thought he needed more and bought a bigger container of the stuff from Costco and used that instead. I don't use ricotta all that much and I didn't know what to do with it but I knew that I didn't want to end up throwing it out. I spent a couple of days toying with the idea of doing muffins so I read recipes, looked at tastespotting, read more recipes and nothing spoke to me. The easy way out was to make stuffed pasta but Shack is away and I am trying to not eat pasta while he is gone because when he is home, we eat it way too often. Then, last week a little voice in my head started to whisper "ricotta pancakes would be nice".

I volunteered to make a dozen of some sort of baked good for The Kid's christmas party at school tomorrow and he requested the compost bars. The only problem is that these have to appeal to kids from the age of 3 to 13 so I had to rethink them a tiny bit to make them more kid friendly. They also had to be nut free since you can't take anything with any nuts in them anywhere anymore. I took out all the nuts and seeds and subbed in milk chocolate to make them a bit sweeter. I also kept the salty toppings to a minimum and only used to some crushed up bugles although, potato chips would have worked well too but I saw the bag of bugles in the store and was instantly transported back to my childhood. I used to LOVE bugles and quite frankly, I didn't even know you could still buy them. I couldn't resist. I love the look of the whole kernels of caramel corn on there too. The toppings you can throw on these things are pretty endless but I thought I would share another v...

It was either drink that damned eggnog or cook with it and the last thing I need to do right now is drink a container of eggnog so I had no choice. I know that might sound weird because you would think eating a ton of cookies with eggnog in them is worse than drinking the stuff, but i rarely eat much of my own baking so it's kind of like putting it away in the back of the closet where I will forget about it.

It's time for the Great Food Blogger Cookie Swap again! I participated last year and not only was it fun to  bake a new kind of cookie and send them to other people, but I received three different kinds of cookies in the mail myself. I had actually not even considered the cookies I would be getting until the first batch of cookies arrived. The best part of a cookie swap was the one part I hadn't factored into the situation - THE SWAP ASPECT. It's always wonderful to get delicious cookies that someone else baked for you and there is something about getting a care package of treats in the mail that is still so exiting. So, this year I wanted to make something different a bit from all of the traditional christmas cookies. To be honest, I would have loved to make my compost cookies because I am all about those babies but it has to be something you haven't featured on your blog before so they were out. Because I made some oatmeal bars last week, I had bars on the...

Christmas season is upon us and, as always, I have a couple of cookie exchanges coming up and  have been combing the internet for inspiration so I can make something shiny and new. I also wanted to enter the cookie contest over at  Manitoba Canola Growers  but the deadline is today at 4pm so that put me on a bit of a deadline. I tend to procrastinate until it's almost too late and then I fly into action - I enjoy working under pressure. I have been told that all that stress will burn away the pounds but I have yet to find this to be true. It probably doesn't help that my stressful energy is spent baking things that must be tasted I suppose.

Canadian Thanksgiving is upon us and so we are getting ready to make our annual trek to spend the holiday with my sister and her family. First of all, let us discuss the merits of having Thanksgiving fall so early in the year, as opposed to the American holiday which occurs right before Christmas. If you are a turkey lover, and we are huge turkey lovers, you want to partake of a big turkey dinner as many times a year as you can possibly manage, no? This means that we like to do turkey for Christmas, Thanksgiving and Easter. I am thinking about making Shack a huge turkey dinner for his birthday in May as well but don't tell him, it's a surprise. Don't worry, he says he reads my blog but he really doesn't so he will never know if you don't tell him. So, back to the merits of an early Thanksgiving. Canadian Thanksgiving has been held on the second Monday of October since 1957. This means it can be as early as Oct 8th, like this year, or as late as the 15th or...